Filipino Canadian Book Festival returns to celebrate diaspora

The Filipino Canadian Book Festival returns for another weekend of literature, storytelling, and community from Aug. 14 to 17 in Vancouver.

The idea began when Nathalie De Los Santos, the festival’s marketing director, attended the Liwanag Literary Festival in Long Beach, Calif. with her friend and previous collaborator.

She asked why there weren’t events like it in Vancouver, and with her friend’s encouragement, the Filipino Canadian Book Festival was born.

“We weren’t expecting it to become as big as it was in 2024,” De Los Santos says. “There were over 500 people who came…. We were just planning to do a little book festival.”

The festival paused in 2025 after the Lapu-Lapu Day tragedy. On April 26, 2025, the driver of an SUV plowed through a street in South Vancouver, killing 11 people and injuring dozens.

“We got funding last year from the Vancouver Status of Women, and at the time we just deemed it a little bit more appropriate to use that funding for grief-centred activities,” De Los Santos says, adding that they held a zine-making workshop and went dragon boating.

The festival aims to continue creating spaces for Filipino stories around immigration, intergenerational memory, and the importance of finding community. This year’s theme is “Writing Our Diaspora: Literature Across Generations.”

The festival’s keynote speaker, Adrian De Leon, is a history professor at New York University and author of Bundok, Balikbayan, and his memoir, Notes from a Wayward Son.

Award-winning author Kawika Guillermo is a returning panelist.

“I grew up in a very repressive environment. I was very religious…. Not a lot of information about racial background, history, queerness, neurodivergence — all the things that I was — so I think I just took to writing, almost like journaling,” Guillermo says. “Eventually, I realized that I was not just speaking for myself, but for a lot more people.”

Guillermo, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s Social Justice Institute, will join the “Writing in the Apocalypse” panel. The panel will explore writing as witness, resistance, survival, and hope, with panelists reflecting on the urgency shaping their work now.

Their most recent book, Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games, discusses their upbringing and life through the video games they were playing.

“I realized at some point that most of the memories that I had from being younger, seeing a lot of people pass away and die from early ages — my uncle, my first girlfriend, my late wife — I’ve just had a lot of death that I’ve dealt with,” Guillermo says.

“I thought of developing a metaphorical method of writing about games and ourselves together…. How we can think about the way we play games, the rules and social worlds it creates, and how it has impacted our lives.”

Guillermo believes it’s important to document their culture through literature because it helps show readers what other countries are like, especially as a person from a racially ambiguous background.

“I think literature is now at a point where we’re able to speak more to our own backgrounds, our own diasporic longing, and our own histories more than we have been before,” Guillermo says.

The Filipino Canadian Book Festival will hold its opening party and Baybayin writing workshop at VS Creative Lab, and the Museum of Vancouver will host the open marketplace and panels.

For tickets, visit www.bit.ly/filipinobookfestival.